A Virtual Hard Disk (VHD) is a file formatted to be structurally identical to a physical Hard Disk Drive. It is typically used in various virtualization packages, and can be used to install a wide variety of operating systems (various versions of Microsoft Windows and Linux). The format was created by Connectix which was later acquired by Microsoft for Virtual PC. Since June 2005 Microsoft has made the VHD Image Format Specification available to ...
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A Virtual Hard Disk (VHD) is a file formatted to be structurally identical to a physical Hard Disk Drive. It is typically used in various virtualization packages, and can be used to install a wide variety of operating systems (various versions of Microsoft Windows and Linux). The format was created by Connectix which was later acquired by Microsoft for Virtual PC. Since June 2005 Microsoft has made the VHD Image Format Specification available to third parties under the Microsoft Open Specification Promise.
Virtual Hard Disks allow multiple operating systems to reside on a single host machine. This enables developers to test software on different operating systems without the cost or hassle of actual hardware. The ability to directly modify a virtual machine’s hard disk from a host server supports many applications, including:
The format is used for Microsoft Virtual PC and was also adopted by XenSource for what is now the Citrix XenServer hypervisor. The VHD format is used by...
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